GameFront » God of War IIIhttp://www.gamefront.com
Read the latest gaming news, get game downloads, mods, patches, and watch game videos at Game Front.Wed, 20 May 2015 00:56:46 +0000enhourly1http://wordpress.org/?v=3.3.1Game Front editors discuss what's going on in the world of video games. Topics often include: the latest news, game releases, controversies, predictions we make (that are often wrong), PC gaming stuff and beyond. Game on!Game FrontnoGame Frontpodcast@gamefront.compodcast@gamefront.com (Game Front)Game Front's weekly podcast covering all things gaming.video games, games, gaming, pc, pc gaming, console gaming, gamer, gamefront, game frontGameFront » God of War IIIhttp://www.gamefront.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/10/gfpodcast-1400.jpghttp://www.gamefront.com
It’s Reasonable to Not Want Small Kids to Play Violent Gameshttp://www.gamefront.com/its-reasonable-to-not-want-small-kids-to-play-violent-games/
http://www.gamefront.com/its-reasonable-to-not-want-small-kids-to-play-violent-games/#commentsWed, 16 Jan 2013 21:47:27 +0000Phil Hornshawhttp://www.gamefront.com/?p=201914

I had an interesting conversation with Robert Dolan, mayor of the town of Melrose, Mass., last week, in which we discussed his town’s program for allowing parents to return violent video games, movies and toys in return for coupons to local businesses.

Dolan’s New Year – New Direction program sounds a bit like that of Southington, Conn., at first mention. That’s the program that had parents turning in violent games and other stuff, but was going to result in all that stuff being burned — and quickly gained national attention as sounding like the rounding up and burning of offensive art. The program in Melrose is much more subdued and thoughtful, from what Dolan told me: Its focus is on educating parents, primarily those of young children, about violent media and toys and their effects on kids, as well as things like ratings systems that can help parents make good purchasing choices.

Speaking with Dolan, the New Year – New Direction program seemed entirely reasonable. It helps parents get clear of violent games they don’t want their kids to have, which they might have received as gifts or purchased without realizing what they were getting into. More than anything, though, it was about helping parents be better parents, and allowing parents to make decisions for their kids.

It’s exactly what the gaming community advocates, in fact — leaving the onus on what media is appropriate for kids with their parents, and not with heavy handed, censoring legislation.

Something that seems like it often gets lost in this discussion of whether violent games are responsible for violent actions is that, regardless of where people fall in the argument, or where the science falls, most of us seem to share the opinion that seven-year-olds probably don’t need to play Call of Duty: Black Ops 2. When Dolan told me a story about veterans of the Iraq and Afghanistan wars visiting elementary school children and those children asking if the experience of being a soldier was like Black Ops, I was taken aback — that’s exactly not what we want kids to think.

So I think I speak for a lot of people when I say that while I have respect for the medium of games and its potential as an art form, and while I’m vehemently opposed to its censorship, I don’t think it should be easy for kids to get hold of violent games. It’s a decision left to parents, under their supervision and with their guidance.

The breakdown here, however, is that these forms of media make easy scapegoats precisely because parents aren’t fully aware of them, and that’s a bad thing. It’s easy for politicians and pundits to demonize games because they know nothing about them — they’re scary and it’s easy to generalize. Back in the late 1990s, the Internet was scary too. It also was demonized in much the same way. Remember all those news stories about Internet predators?

And just today, President Barack Obama called for a $10 million study by the Centers for Disease Control into the link between violent media, specifically games, and actual violence. I can’t see how that study would turn up anything different than the others that have shown no causal link between violence in media and violence in people, but the very fact that video games have been made into another convenient target — yet again — should be evidence that there’s something wrong. The trouble isn’t that people with an agenda to push love to look for an easy target, as that’s unavoidable; the trouble is that video games remain an easy target, even 14 years after Columbine.

]]>http://www.gamefront.com/its-reasonable-to-not-want-small-kids-to-play-violent-games/feed/13Kratos Revels in Cruelty, and God of War 3 Assumes You Do Toohttp://www.gamefront.com/kratos-revels-in-cruelty-and-god-of-war-3-assumes-you-do-too/
http://www.gamefront.com/kratos-revels-in-cruelty-and-god-of-war-3-assumes-you-do-too/#commentsTue, 15 Jan 2013 22:15:37 +0000Phil Hornshawhttp://www.gamefront.com/?p=200608

I’ve been messing around in the God of War: Ascension multiplayer beta for a few weeks now, in hopes of putting together some impressions of what Sony Santa Monica’s new foray into the world of murdering Greek mythological characters will be like. The mandate of the game more than anything is, “Make players feel like Kratos, but against other players.”

It had been a while since I played a God of War title, and I’ve previously never gotten around to playing God of War 3. Back when it first came out, I really enjoyed the first God of War title. It seemed the right time to finally play God of War 3 to get a fresh comparison to the multiplayer offerings of Ascension.

My conclusions as they relate to Ascension are in another article; this article is to talk about what an incredible dick the character of Kratos is, and ask why anyone would ever want to make a game about him — much less play as him.

God of War 3 is an exercise in psychopathy, far beyond the usual power fantasy that many games usually want to convey. It’s striking how the game goes out of its way to be gross and force you to be a bad person. As I played through it, there were many times I just kind of couldn’t believe the things the game left me no choice but to do. Kratos is angry, I get it; he’s wrath incarnate, driven by revenge. And that’s fine, because we see that with lots of characters, all the time. But few go out of their way to inflict pain and anguish on people for no reason, just because they can, and take so much pleasure in doing so.

And even worse is the way the game assumes that we are also taking intense pleasure in this cruelty.

The moments pop up with alarming regularity. Early in the game, Kratos encounters a character in Hell, bound in a chair behind a wall of brambles. Despite the character’s repeated pleading, the puzzle solution for the room is to burn him alive. That’s it. Your reward is a magic bow that you apparently need to proceed, but there’s no way Kratos could have known burning that guy would reward him with a magic bow. The whole sequence is rendered an exercise in committing an elaborate murder, seemingly for no reason.

This happens all the time in God of War 3. Characters are constantly crying out for Kratos’ help, and he not only ignores them, he usually actively goes out of his way to inflict pain on them. As you run around Olympus and Hell, you pass people who are just wandering around trying not to get killed by falling debris or godly battles — and yet the game rewards you for grabbing any single one of them and stabbing the s–t out of them, totally unprovoked. You get experience points for it.

Those instances aren’t even that bad. Much worse are the many, many moments in which a character you’ve already bested begs you for mercy. In fact, this happens in nearly every boss fight, and a number of times with characters whom you don’t really need to kill for any discernible reason. Kratos is just like, “You were mean to me,” and proceeds to do some disemboweling.

It’s worse when Kratos consciously decides to hurt people who are objectively innocent, or at the very least uninvolved in his situation. There’s a moment late in the game in which Kratos discovers Poseidon’s mistress. The woman, held behind metal bars, doesn’t even get to wear real clothes — her breasts are exposed and bounce around because That’s What Gamers Want To See™, presumably. As Kratos moves through the palace, he allows the woman to leave her chamber, but she’s promptly attacked by various monsters.

On April 25, I was invited down to the Andaz Hotel in West Hollywood for a chance to preview several of Sony’s upcoming Playstation 3 games in advance of E3. What I saw indicates a bright future for fans of multiplayer and cooperative gameplay, but perhaps the biggest news to come out of the event is the long awaited reveal of PlayStation’s answer to Nintendo’s Super Smash Bros. series: Playstation All-Stars Battle Royale.

Developed by Sony protege SuperBot, a second-party studio groomed in-house for this project, Playstation All-Stars Battle Royale promises a fast-paced, hilarious, and fun chance to scratch the fighting game itch without the darkness and convoluted mythology typical of the genre. It is, simply put, designed to give Playstation fans the chance to find out the answer to questions like “could Kratos kill Parappa?” I got my hands on it for a couple of hours, and lived to tell the tale.

Playstation All-Stars Battle Royale is due out this holiday season, though no specific date has been decided. I’ll need to see the finished game to determine whether or not releasing it at this late date in the Playstation 3′s life cycle, or going after the Super Smash bros. concept so long after it was invented is a good idea. Nevertheless, what I did see indicates that SuperBot might have come up with a great send-off for the PLaystation 3.

Game Play

The theme of the two games I had the chance to preview (the first is embargoed out the wazoo — look for our hands-on Wednesday, May 2) seems to be “easy for newcomers, rewarding for experts.” They weren’t difficult to figure out, but evaded the boredom that comes with making things just a bit too simple.

That’s due in part to the intuitive control scheme, which puts each of the DualShock controller’s options to use without over-burdening players with endlessly complex commands. The left stick and D-pad are interchangeable and allow players to choose their preferred means of moving their character around. X is jump, while Circle, Triangle and Square offer different standard attacks. L1 is Block, R1 picks up objects (like weapons, themed to the levels in which they’re dropped) and R3 offers several different grapple moves. Finally, R2 activates the Super Meter Attack (more in a second).

Combat is deceptively simple. Players can easily tap-tap-tap their way to a slow victory, provided they’re up against lesser opponents, but by trying different combinations of buttons, they can pull of some excellent combo moves. Unlike the more complex Capcom fighting games, you don’t need a degree in math to pull off some of the better ones — my experience is that the attack buttons themselves are enough. But the real star is the Super Meter Attack. You see, players aren’t killed permanently in Playstation All-Stars — they’re vaporized temporarily, only to respawn shortly thereafter. Instead, victory is determined by points at the end of the game. But, next to your character’s icon on the screen, you’ll notice a bar where the life meter would normally be. That’s the Super Meter. When it’s full, clicking the R2 button unleashes a powerful, temporary attack bonus that is themed to each character.

Interestingly, the Super Attacks don’t make you overwhelming. Other players can doge your attacks and get out of your way. But you’ll be temporarily immune to your opponents’ attacks (although not to environmental dangers), and you’ll get to deliver some wonderful damage if you get to your opponents. Even better, each character has 3 different attacks, each more powerful than the last, which you’ll access each time you power up. If you’re temporarily killed by one of your opponents, your meter resets to zero, so there’s an incentive to fight strategically to ensure you don’t lose the change to call one down.

A new banner image on the official PlayStation Facebook page (pictured above) teases an April 19th reveal. While nothing further is known for certain, speculation points to God of War 4. Vengeance is right up Kratos’ alley.

Can’t wait for God of War 4? Well, rather than take a step forward and witness Kratos’ muscles rendered at even higher resolutions, let’s hop into our DeLorean and travel back to a simpler time, when 8-bit was all the rage.

Here’s an 8-bit, not-for-profit fan “demake” of God of War, created as a love letter to both the series itself as well as old school gaming in general.

News about the upcoming – and, I think, not really necessary – God of War 4 snuck out over the weekend, and it’s pretty juicy. If, that is, you find an already declining series jumping on an in-danger-of-being-completely-played-out gaming fad to be juicy. The UK version of PSM is reporting that the 4th installment in the saga of Kratos will feature online co-op multiplayer:

It’s bringing double Kratos to the series. GOW4 was confirmed to PSM3 mid-2011 by a reliable source, and rumours point to a multiplayer twist. Mad idea? Online co-op with a (possibly) dead Kratos and (very) dead brother Deimos teaming up to escape the afterlife.

Count me among those who just said ‘yuck’. Then again, I wasn’t a big fan of God of War 3 either. It’s a game I feel, incidentally, to have been transparently a tarted up Playstation 2 game ported at the last moment to Playstation 3, and to have suffered as a result. But who knows, maybe 4 will turn out to be great. And helping to make that happen is the news that Defense of the Ancients composer Timothy Williams (who also worked on films like Watchmen and Sucker Punch) will be scoring it. He’s apparently added it to his resume (link is up and down).

If you’re seriously interested in 3D environment modeling, or are perhaps even considering it as a career path, then you may want to check out this instructional DVD by Nate Stephens, Senior Environment Artist at Respawn Entertainment. With 10 years of experience as an environment artist in the video game industry and a resume that includes work for God of War 3, City of Heroes, and StarCraft Ghost, Stephens is a veteran in the field.

In the DVD is a tutorial that details the process of transforming concept art into a fully rendered game environment model via Maya. Taking concept art originally developed by concept artist Cecil Kim, Stephens identifies the forms and structures of environments, blocks them out and proceeds through the modeling process — touching on the key concepts, tools and techniques needed during continuous refinement. The tutorial also covers common errors to avoid, ensuring the correct lighting and efficiency for running the scene or exploring the environment in real time.

Mad Men actor Aaron Staton, one of the only actors (or people, for that matter) to ever exist within a video game (LA Noire), now feels more qualified to review video games than anyone on the planet. We think he has a point. It’s one thing to play a game, and another to make a game–but quite another to be in a game.

Enjoy Aaron’s sage dissections of today’s most popular blockbusters.

He’s not very impressed.

Click the preview, below, to view the full-sized (~2 meg) version of this GameFront original.

When it comes to booming bass and irritating my neighbors, God of War 3 is f–king TOPS (nobody was happy with me when that thing came out), and so you won’t hear me complain about another loud, obnoxious PS3 God of War title, if it were to exist. And the new issue of PSM3 says it does, or that it will someday, rather. According to a source of theirs, God of War 4 is in development and is aiming for a September 2012 release. So expect it in early 2013.

Since that’s the whole story here, I’ll leave you with a random God of War anecdote. I almost never go to Goodwill because their t-shirts are usually more expensive that ones I can find at other thrift stores, but for some reason I stopped by one in Santa Monica last year. Amusingly, I found a huge pile of Santa Monica Studios God of War III dev team t-shirts there.

]]>http://www.gamefront.com/report-god-of-war-4-coming-september-2012/feed/1The History of Video Games in One Long Takehttp://www.gamefront.com/the-history-of-video-games-in-one-long-take/
http://www.gamefront.com/the-history-of-video-games-in-one-long-take/#commentsThu, 13 Jan 2011 22:12:56 +0000Phil Owenhttp://www.gamefront.com/?p=80739

We’re in the midst of awards season for movies, but as games have become more of an established part of the mainstream, this is also slowly becoming awards season for games as well, what with the BAFTAs and the WGA giving out game awards. Today the Writers Guild of America announced its nominees, and here are your nominees for the Video Game Writing award:

OK, so that’s an undeniably s–t list, but there is something you must keep in mind: only members of the WGA or folks applying to be members of the Guild are eligible. Even with the pool of candidates being limited, though, you gotta think they could’ve done better than this, but then again I really have no idea who in the gaming industry are guild members.

There really isn’t much reason or most game writers to be WGA members, though, because most often game writers are employees of the game’s developers (with few exceptions); they don’t need protection the way movie and TV writers do.

Really it just comes down to who submits their game for the award, because you’ll be eligible if you submit a guild application with the award submission. Folks probably just didn’t submit.

This just makes me wish they didn’t give this award, because they’re recognizing some really bad writing here. Having Singularity on here is like the WGA nominating, like, Timecop for a screenplay award. S–t, now that I think of it, Singularity really is just Timecop but with Russians. Huh.

The year is winding down, which means our GameFront 2010 feature series is also winding down. As we come ever closer to embracing 2011, too, we ease up a little on our rhetoric. OK, so maybe that’s not really true.

This feature is all about expectations and what about this year in gaming defied them, for good or for bad. Expect strong rhetoric.

Phil Owen

Pleasant surprise: Fallout: New Vegas

I think I was probably expecting New Vegas to be a pretty OK game. And then I played Alpha Protocol, Obsidian’s other 2010 game. That was a disaster in so many ways, not the least of which was its utter lack of vision.

New Vegas, however, is a game of almost unprecedented vision. It’s a game that was longer and had a larger scope than Fallout 3. It has a million sidequests, but doing said sidequests never feels like dicking around because most everything you do in the game factors in to the main plot somehow. There’s a focus to this game few RPGs have ever dreamt of having.

With this game, Obsidian has shown it has a much better handle on this type of open-world RPG than Bethesda, or any other developer, really, ever did.

Last straw: Heavy Rain

OK, David Cage, you had an interesting idea for a game with Indigo Prophecy, but that ended up devolving into a lot of annoying and ridiculous nonsense as it went along. That was all right, because it was your first go at it. Heavy Rain, though, is much worse than Indigo Prophecy, though, and it proved that your priorities are all f–ked up when you’re making a game.

Yeah, you can set a mood, but you don’t think it’s important to have quality voice acting in your character-based drama? You’re OK with leaving a bunch of massive, gaping plot holes in the already very silly and dumb story you created even though your game’s success is wholly contingent on the story being effective? You’re very lucky that gamers have incredibly low standards.

Heavy Rain, then, was a “last straw” for me, because it made me realize that if this whole “interactive drama” thing is going to work, then some other developer — like Rockstar or BioWare or Remedy, to a came a few that would do it well — should venture into this genre. With Quantic Dream being the only folks holding that flag for it now, interactive drama will never be truly effective. There were a lot of warning signs on Indigo Prophecy, and QD apparently learned nothing from their mistakes.

Phil Hornshaw

Pleasant surprise: Assassin’s Creed Brotherhood

There were a couple times when I had to feign enthusiasm for Assassin’s Creed: Brotherhood before it was released just to do my job. Other people like those games, I had to tell myself, so this news post is worth writing up.

Even though Assassin’s Creed 2 is garbage.

The Assassin’s Creed series up to now has been an abysmally boring, tedious attempt at an open-world Prince of Persia that has FAILED at every turn. Seriously, I can’t fathom why people like Assassin’s Creed 2 especially, in which the combat has been made more annoying than in its predecessor and the controls are, more often than not, designed to help you kill yourself.

Then I had to review Brotherhood, and I anticipated several days straight of being annoyed before finally penning a review condemning squeezing out another AC game a year after the last that was just as lame.

So yeah, Brotherhood is a surprise — because it’s great. Just about every issue I had with Assassin’s Creed 2 has been addressed, in some form. Horses are available everywhere. Combat has been tweaked so that gang-beatings are far less common. Many buildings have lifts to save you the trouble of scaling them over and over again.

I can see why people like Assassin’s Creed, and why I’ve bothered to play the games at all, now that the B.S. has been stripped out in a lot of places. I’m much more willing to wander around in Rome when I can get where I’m going quickly. Just the ability to call additional assassins to a fight makes the game much more appealing because I know each battle isn’t going to be a grind anymore. Brotherhood is a game I actually want to play.

And it has an interesting, challenging multiplayer mode that doesn’t totally suck, to boot.

Last Straw: Useless f–king collection quests

Listen, game developers, because I’m about to blow your brains out your ears — no one likes collection quests. No one. No one likes scouring Alan Wake’s stupidly large forest areas only to discover nothing, and then maybe later come across a can pyramid or thermos in a really obvious place. No one cares about finding Borgia flags, feathers, artifacts and whatever the hell else is packed into AC Brotherhood.

So stop putting these in games PLEASE. Dropping 500 random objects into a game that earn you an achievement for collecting is no longer acceptable, and it’s not clever. It’s an artificial means of extending gameplay, it’s boring and it’s a waste of a player’s time. Slapping an achievement on something dumb just because you have 50 achievements to burn and couldn’t think of anything else does not constitute good game design.

Here’s the issue: every stupid game at this point has huge, irritating collection quests. It’s not just a few games, like tracking down 100 packages in Grand Theft Auto 3 or 4 for the challenge. It’s finding all 2 billion orbs in Crackdown. Thermoses, can pyramids, manuscript pages, TVs and radios in Alan Wake. Meaningless pins that commemorate your minor changes to the game world in Epic Mickey.

If you’re going to add game content to this stuff, then that’s one thing — finding the manuscript pages in Alan Wake wasn’t all that bad because they enhanced your video game experience, and at least if you managed to track down the collectibles in Splatterhouse, you were left with naked pictures. But in most games, you get nothing but a pat on the back in the form of an achievement. That’s actually kind of worse, because now everyone you play games with knows what a sad little hermit you are that you sat on your couch and found every stupid object hidden in Assassin’s Creed, and it amounted to absolutely nothing. Providing gamers who like your game with a gofer job for the sake of hitting all the achievements is just lazy.

I can’t handle obsessively checking every corner of Dead Space 2 for audio journals, staring at my screen until I get a headache to find one goddamn COG tag in Gears of War 3, or getting killed over and over because I suspect there’s an Intel package past that throng of enemy soldiers in the next Call of Duty.

Do you have fun tearing apart your house when you lose your car keys? No? Then stop making us look for virtual car keys in your video games. We’re here to have fun.

Phil Owen note: Yay Crackdown 2 orbs. There were 800 of those f–kers. And that game is built so that you kinda have to go looking for them, which sucks because I learned long ago to ignore collectibles.

Ross Lincoln

Last Straw(s): God Of War III

I didn’t want to hate God of War III, I swear. I love God of War and GOWII, and seeing how other PS2-exclusive franchises had been updated, like, well for PS3 (for example, Ratchet and Clank Future), I expected A) that they would provide more of what we love while B) vastly improving everything they can. I was readier than hell for more hilarious carnage and epic Kratos being a dick to everyone in the Aegean while laying the smackdown to the Greek Pantheon action.

Unfortunately, the only thing God of War III managed was to sour me on the entire series. Put simply, GOW3 is a lazy, tarted up PS2 port that adds nothing original to the series, and in fact is something of an embarrassment. Sure, the graphics are fantastic, but it’s PS3; graphics would only be noteworthy if they sucked — or if they’re the only thing fantastic about it. Well, not the only thing. The sex mini game was also wonderful. But everything else is either exactly the same as the PS2 installments of the series, or they’re worse.

Plot and Characters: Terrible, if only because Kratos is an even more paper thin, one-dimensional character than ever before. Every line of dialogue is nothing but Kratos refusing to use contractions while glaring angrily at everyone. And the story simply peters out, even if the ending is kind of interesting. Somehow they managed to take what seemed to be a story leading to a massively incredible climax and make it excruciatingly boring.

Controller mapping and sensitivity: The controls worked exactly the same as in previous games, but ended up being a thousand times more annoying because they didn’t really need to be. I get why the camera is fixed during land-based combat. But having the camera remain fixed while trying to glide or swim just sucks. But these were forgivable in the sense that it’s obvious that GOW III was a lazy cash-in. But the fact that the quick time events and certain actions in regular gameplay were so easy to f–k up (falling to your doom when performing gliding command exactly as instructed) simply because of the fixed camera and insensitive buttons practically caused a stroke.

Save points, f–king save points: I admit this is the well from which all of my hate sprung. In 2010 there is simply no excuse whatsoever for a game that actually forces you to seek out a specific location in which to save, particularly so the auto-save sucks large and you end up having to play out large swaths of game just to get to a point where you can take a break and turn off your machine for a while. GoWIII wasn’t the worst offender — Dead Rising 2 and Lost Planet 2 are probably worse — but the fact that the previous GOW games were of vastly higher quality than either of the other 2 franchises made this absurd, lazy throwback to the previous gen unforgivable. Every time I had to hack my way to yet another save point I became angrier and more frustrated until I just stopped playing. I finally forced myself to finish the game because I had a review to complete. I haven’t touched it since.

God of War III was the last straw. Cheap, frustrating and so obviously intended to be a pS2 game that was clumsily updated for PS3 in the most shallow possible way, I disliked it so much that it has not only ruined my ability to go back and enjoy the previous two games (kind of like the last 15 minutes of BSG), but deterred all interest in playing anything remotely connected to the franchise in the future.

Phil O note: I was totally with GOWIII for like the first 20 minutes. But after Kratos fell into Hades (again) it lost me very quickly. And it really did turn out that it blew its load right there at the beginning, which is lame as s–t. So f–k God of War III and f–k you, Ross, for being completely wrong about the end of BSG.

Shawn Sines

I was pleasantly surprised that neither Move nor Kinect were shoddy Wii replacements. I realize a lot of core gamers scoff at the concept of making games more accessible, but the Kinect and Move brought innovation to two game systems that were beginning to stagnate.

The Move really shows the potential for the wand-based motion control, while Kinect, despite some small issues I believe will vanish with software updates – like space requirements and skin tone detection problems – shows a huge potential future for intuitive controls.

For my last straw I’d have to say Military First Person Shooters are now dead to me. I played Battlefield Bad Company 2, Medal of Honor, Black Ops.. and you know what.. they’re all just the same crappy games from different publishers and developers.

I accept that these titles are popular. I even accept that at one time I loved the Call of Duty/Medal of Honor formula before they were formulas and became the Madden of shooter games. Innovation is hard when 12 year old and 40 year old gamers alike throw money at you for the same retreaded gameplay and a few new maps.. I understand that, but until something really drastic evolves from these games I’m checking out.

]]>http://www.gamefront.com/gamefront-2010-the-years-pleasant-surprises-and-last-straws/feed/2Gamefront 2010: Most Violent Gameshttp://www.gamefront.com/most-violent-games-of-2010/
http://www.gamefront.com/most-violent-games-of-2010/#commentsSat, 18 Dec 2010 01:57:23 +0000Ben Richardsonhttp://www.gamefront.com/?p=78072
Since the beginning of time, gamers have loved violence, and game designers have loved giving it to them. Since the advent of modern hardware and software, that violence has been more realistic than ever, serving up immaculate HD limbs, blood splatters, and giblets flying in every direction. We at GameFront take a certain ghoulish glee in all the carnage, and we’ve put our heads together to bring you the most violent games of 2010.

Fallout: New Vegas

Ben Richardson’s Pick

Fallout: New Vegas certainly can’t touch some of the games on this list when it comes to inventiveness, or when it comes to volume of blood spilled. Played a certain way, however, Obsidian’s offering can be violent with the best of them. Disregarding the game’s extensive questing and exploration sections, and focusing on the action, the violence is about VATS. I don’t know what the breakdown of players is — some may love it, others hate it — but I use the targeting system extensively, because it reminds me of the first two Fallout games’ awesome turn-based combat. And when I walk into a room filled with hostiles and I start cuing up headshots, I know what’s about to ensue: a solid minute or two of melting, frying, reduced-to-ashes, all-the-limbs-flying-off-and-bouncing-off-the-ceiling abattoir action. Sure, almost all of the animations were present in Fallout 3 also, and the game engine doesn’t make them look particularly convincing, but let’s be honest — is there another 2010 release that features a “decapitated head cam?”

Yakuza 3

Phil Owen’s Pick

This game is not violent in the “oh s–t there is blood and guts errwhere” kind of way — I think maybe three people die in the whole game, even though you’ll probably fight 10,000 different people. No, this game is just violent in the “I can’t walk ten feet down this crowded street in the middle of the day without somebody trying to kick my ass for no reason” kind of way.

Yakuza 3 is an open-world game, and you can wander around the streets of whatever fictionalized Japanese city you find yourself in. But walking down the street is perilous, because no matter where you go, there is some guy standing on every street corner who will chase your ass down and awkwardly tell you to put up your dukes because he doesn’t like that I’m older than he is or for some other equally stupid reason.

So if you play the game for a while, you’ll discover that probably 90% of the fights in the entire game are like that, which means 90% of the fights in the entire game don’t even figure into the plot, — not even a little bit — because at no point does Kazuma consider moving his orphanage someplace less violent.

Love the series? Planning to pick up Yakuza 4? If you do, take advantage of our full walkthru

God of War 3

Ron Whitaker’s Pick

Kratos has always been a violent sort. He’s killed gods, titans, and innocents with equal abandon, and God of War 3 allows him to continue his bloody rampage. This time, he’s methodically wiping out the gods of Olympus.

He eliminates Poseidon from the back of a titan and rips off the head of Helios to use as a freakin’ flashlight. He even returns to the caverns of Hell to eliminate Hades, and while he’s there he kills Hephaestus, after he’s scored with his wife. Kratos also kills Hera, indirectly killing off all plant life in Olympus itself.

To traverse chasms, he grabs onto harpies and repeatedly stabs them to get them to fly his way. Large trolls and minotaurs are controlled by stabbing them — the spray of blood forces the monsters to do his bidding. All in all, Kratos’ trail of blood and destruction in 2010 is wider (and bloodier) than it has ever been before.

Mark Burnham’s Two Cents

Ron already pretty much nailed it here, so I’ll just add a few of my standout GoW 3 moments of brutal violence. I’m never really fazed by violence in games, but these moments in particular were pretty rough:

When Kratos punches Hercules in the face so many times his face gets all gnawed down to a gaping hole, and his teeth are all shattered and stuff.

When Kratos gouges out Poseidon’s eyes.

Whenever Kratos rips out a Troll’s eye.

When Kratos rips off that water horse’s jaw in the beginning.

When Kratos tears off Hermes’ legs.

LIMBO

Phil Hornshaw’s Pick

I got to play Splatterhouse this year, and if you’re looking for cartoon violence and buckets of stylized monster blood, go directly to your nearest Best Buy and buy that game. If you want your violence to be pixelated and meaningless, with all the purpose and realism of a plastic model kit, Splatterhouse is also your best bet.

Meanwhile, when I think of games that were violent and it freaked me out a little bit, I have to go with Limbo. Like Splatterhouse, Limbo is often merciless in its violence, with characters getting crushed, liquefied, dismembered, run through, and hung. But the similarities end in the banality of method.

Where other games revel in violence, Limbo uses its intensely painful-looking deaths as a way of adding additional disquiet to an already spooky f–king world. Walking along in the forest, accidentally stepping in a bear trap, and suddenly seeing your head go flying as the steel jaws snap closed wasn’t just violent — it was disturbing. In all the right ways.

For me, the best use of violence in a game is for throwing the player off his or her axis. Sure, tearing arms off guys and beating them with them can be fun once in a while, but it’s not as shocking as it was when, say, Scorpion tore off his own face in order to finish his opponents with a burst of flaming breath. Limbo touches a nerve by contrasting youth, innocence and beauty with really morbid, painful-looking deaths.

Nothing this year was as delightfully creepy as watching a Limbo character, brain slug attached to his skull, throw himself into a lake and drown — except for knowing that you had the same fate in store. And while making enemies bleed profusely and die horribly is fun, dragging a body out of a pool of water and using it to solve a puzzle, and feeling your skin crawl as you do it, is much, much cooler.

Splatterhouse

Phil Hornshaw’s OTHER Pick

Okay, okay — it’s a gimme, I know, but you can’t talk violence this year without Splatterhouse, and as I mentioned under Limbo, there’s a ton to go around. The game is conceived in violence, and it does get pretty imaginative in its eviscerations. Most of the time, you’re just punching things into a pulp, and that’s fine, but every so often you get to perform Splatterkills, and they are all….absolutely…ridiculous.

The Splatterkills are quicktime events, and they all end horribly for whatever monster you’re committing them against. A common one has you ripping off an enemy’s arms while you press your foot into his back. In one you crush a skull between your palms. There’s even a Splatterkill where you punch a monster in the ass, reach in there and tear out its intestines.

The whole time, the enemies are spraying fountains of blood in every direction, all spiffed out and cartooned up to give it more than just a campy horror movie vibe — and there’s a truckload of that — but also a bit of super-bright cel-shaded style.

You know, looking back on Splatterhouse, I’d come to think the violence in it wasn’t all that interesting, but as I write this up I realize that it does touch a nerve, being over-the-top and hilarious in many ways. Prying open the jaws of a evil little monkey-sized reptile-gremlin and ripping its lungs out has a certain…panache, maybe. At the very least, it speaks to something kind of primal that makes me grin uncontrollably when thinking about dismembering hellish monsters. And then using those cut-off chunks to kill other monsters.

]]>http://www.gamefront.com/most-violent-games-of-2010/feed/1GameFront 2011: What We Hope To See In Gaming In the Coming Yearhttp://www.gamefront.com/gamefront-2011-what-we-hope-to-see-in-gaming-in-the-coming-year/
http://www.gamefront.com/gamefront-2011-what-we-hope-to-see-in-gaming-in-the-coming-year/#commentsFri, 17 Dec 2010 05:17:21 +0000Phil Owenhttp://www.gamefront.com/?p=77964

Gamers are idealistic about our games; we have to be, or else we would have long ago abandoned this activity we’re ostracized for taking part in. Since we love gaming so much we want to marry it, we often talk about how to make it better. Here is what we hope will improve in the world of gaming in 2011.

Ron Whitaker’s wish:

My big hope is that the success the PC has seen as a gaming platform this year heralds a comeback for the platform overall in 2011. Sure, Starcraft 2, Bad Company 2, and Fallout: New Vegas were huge PC titles, but I would love to see us get back to having games targeted at PC, and (with the exception of Starcraft 2) not ported over from a console release.

There are still a few developers that do this, but the number has dwindled in recent years. It may take a game that can find a middle ground between World of Warcraft and Farmville, but I still think it can happen. God, just think of it: World of Farmville. Kinda gives you the willies, doesn’t it?

Phil Hornshaw’s wish:

More cross-platform compatibility

One of the more interesting things I’ve seen on the mobile gaming front are iPhone and iPad apps that link up with games on other platforms. There are apps out there that let you scour the World of Warcraft auction house, for example, and Ubisoft recently put out an app that links up to users’ Uplay accounts so they can…spend their Uplay points, I guess. I have iPhone apps that let me interact with friends lists for Xbox Live, Playstation Network and Steam, all at once.

And having been paying attention to mobile gaming over the last few months, I’ve been consistently impressed with what’s going on there. Studios big and small are putting out some interesting, innovative games on Apple’s devices at a pace that’s almost staggering. One recent game for the iPad lets you use your iPhone as a controller via Bluetooth or wifi. A poker app I recently ran across turns the iPad into the felt and players’ iPhones into their hole cards.

So here’s what I’d love to see next year: iPhone games that matter to Xbox 360 games. PC first-person shooters that link to Android apps for, I dunno, minigames that have you cleaning your weapons so they do more damage. Apps that let you spectate your friends’ StarCraft games live on your phone (like OnLive’s recent iPad app). And anything that lets you use a touchscreen device as a console controller.

Maybe it’s asking a lot for developers and hardware companies and bitter corporate rivals to be friendly, but I don’t care — this is wish upon a star time, and my wish is that every cool thing I own would do cool things with every other cool thing I own. Microsoft and Sony and Activision and Ubisoft and, hell, just about everybody have various apps in various app stores. How come I can use my iPhone as my PC’s mouse but not to call plays for a Playstation-bound football team? If the industry truly wants to do some new and amazing things with gaming, it shouldn’t bother making players wave their arms at cameras: it should start thinking about finding ways to make gaming a more integrated and ubiquitous part of our lives. All it would take is a little cooperation.

Phil Owen’s wish:

More budget games

One of my favorite games of the year is Deadly Premonition (pictured), a jokey J-horror Xbox 360 and PS3 game that cost $19.99 at retail on release day. It generally is a very ugly game, and the gaming press wasn’t too fond of it, but it cost $20, and so it was the top-selling Xbox 360 game the week it came out. I s–t you not.

We need more of that. It serves two purposes: 1) you give the gamers a f–king break for once, and 2) you’re much more likely to successfully introduce a new IP if it comes a low price point, and if that works and folks like it, you can sell the sequel at full price and people will still buy it because they liked the first one so much. Publishers: you are not required to price every game at $60. You are allowed to strategically price games. A budget game doesn’t have to be $20, of course; the “traditional” budget retail game price for this generation is $40, and any price point between $20 and $60 should be considered.

This doesn’t have to be a regular practice, and it probably should not so you can protect the $60 price point. But as Deadly Premonition — a game nobody knew anything about, really — proved, folks will gobble up things that are cheap.

Mark Burnham’s wishes:

I don’t ever want to see the words “you are overencumbered and cannot run” in 2011. Bethesda, how dare you. That is a down right Jurassic-old gameplay mechanic that should be extinct. Fix it in Skyrim.

A PS3 remake of Final Fantasy VII. At least an announcement. Shut up, this article is about our hopes and dreams. Not our predictions.

No more “thermos collectibles,” by which I mean, needless collectibles with all the importance of pogs. Alan Wake. Looking at you, bud.

Shooters with longer, better single-player campaigns.

Ross Lincoln’s wishes:

Adding to what Ron says, given the huge sales of PC games in 2010, I hope this means that PC gaming comes back in a big way in 2011, and thinking of Civilization V, I’d add I hope this is not at the expense of what makes PC games different from console games. Don’t dumb down games that only work on PC to appeal to an audience who likely doesn’t have a computer they use for gaming anyway. Keep. It. Real.

I’d also like to see, once and for all, the end of save points for anything except deliberately old school games. It was thankfully rare in 2010, but two(ish) high profile games – God of War III and Lost Planet 2 – both inexplicably forced players to fight their way to save points in order to take a damned break. Maybe this wouldn’t have been such a big deal even 2 years ago, but now that almost everything is save-anywhere-when-not-in-mission + auto-saves-constantly, it’s time for that almost to go away. If you make a game for current gen systems and can’t bother utilizing their potential, it’s time to think about switching to Facebook apps.

Finally, absolutely no more movie adaptations, aborted attempted adaptations, or rumors of adaptations of any game that already has a huge story, beloved characters and canon characterizations. The Uncharted Series is already better than most movies; word of their adaptation was bad enough but the fact that David O. Russell appeared to be jettisoning every single thing that is identifiably “Uncharted” was simple absurd (and don’t get me started about casting).

This is doubly true for games that have all of that plus customizability; The Mass Effect movie, for instance, which will undoubtedly suck. Not only because no movie could possibly improve on the already epic story (and very likely, the story will be “streamlined” and dumbed down considerably), but because Hollywood sexism will demand it be about the male Commander Shepherd. That’s a giant middle finger not only to female Mass Effect fans but also to people who know that Female Commander Shepherd’s voice actor is just better, and thus, the game is kinda better playing as her. The fact is, video games are beginning to outsell movies; if we’re talking American movies ONLY, they’re also becoming better storytelling mechanisms. Better to let them grow without douching them up.

Ben Richardson’s wishes:

More new IP. Remember the thrill of discovery you felt the first time you played Mass Effect? When there was a whole galaxy, a whole mythology to explore, full of unfamiliar concepts, ideas, and characters? I want to have that feeling more often. The game industry has a crushing case of sequelitis, stemming from the fact that games are such a big investment. Why risk 50 million to develop a game that may or may not sell, when you can just churn out Military Shooter 4: The Explosioning? While I’m as psyched for Dead Space 2, Portal 2, and Total War: Shogun 2 as the next guy, I’m also intrigued by games like L.A. Noire that are offering something unfamiliar.

I’d like to get a break from zombies. They’ve had a good run, but now its time to move on to something else. I can’t imagine that anyone else is really excited by them now either.

Echoing Ross’ remarks, next year it will be 2011. That means that as soon as I encounter a game with an unskippable cutscene, I will remove it from my Xbox and throw it directly out the window, while demonstrating absolutely no regard for passers-by. Seriously. There is no longer any excuse.